Why do we do it?
Not just with Phantoms that is.
I came out of the Army in 1953, and being at a bit of a lose end and having done many 'flights' I went to Air Services Training in Southampton to see if thee would be a place for me as at that time BEA were advertising for 'trainees'.
Imagine my shock when being given the 'tour', the accommodation was almost exactly the same as my first army barracks. Lines of beds with the same lockers etc. That really put me off. So I declined, (In retrospect a silly move, as eventually flying was the best thing that could have happened to me)
However.......
In 1958 I did my first SOLO flight in a J4 Auster,(High wing tail dragger with a gypsy Major engine Circa 19 40 Ex war time plane I think, at the local club), and got bitten again by the flying bug.
Started my own business and that put an end to the flying for some years. In the early 70s I just had to go back to it and as time and finances allowed it I started again. I did the PPL , as you do, then added the Night, IMC, and so on up to PPL/IR.
My first plane was a quarter share in a Tipsy Nipper. A tiny Mid wing, VW engine, hand cranked to get it started, Tric U/C Single seater . Strap it on and off you go. (Fully aerobatic too) . Went up through the (5) grades until at the end I had a Beech Bonanza V tail with a history you just would not believe until you read the log books. (Landings in CROYDON,,,,, yup !!! 1948 build, served in the Israeli air force, was in boxes in Cape Town for three years, shipped to the UK etc) This one I upgraded to Airways Spec so I could fly IFR etc etc. I just loved flying way above the clouds or in the thick of it on instruments etc. And with radar vectoring to an ILS it was so safe. (Not too happy with being in a stack though)
But around 1979 the costs had escalated to such an extent I just could not afford it any longer. The Beech is still flying though under a different Reg.
Photography had always been a semi pro hobby along with my normal business (Engineering actually) . weddings etc etc.... So when Digital came along I was quick to join the movement.
When I retired I had time to get into video animation, making films etc etc. but I wanted more.
I looked at RC planes as a way to go but was not happy and helicopters were (And still are IMHJO) impossible until QUADS came along.
So what to get?
I am not a builder, so it had to be RTF and the initial solution was the Phantom 1.
This taught me a lot though FPV was not like the real thing, just as Flight Sim is also not good enough when you have hundreds of real flying hours under your belt.
A GoPro3 black got me the basics of Aerial photography but again the cost of upgrading and adding weight and limited flight time was a definite Nono.
So now we have the P2V+ which is a huge step forward.
Of course, it being so new, we are limited in what it can do. OK.. multi waypoints and full autonomous flights. Great but.....
It will only allow you to tilt he camera while moving along. OK you can flip S1 to take control and do the photo stuff, but you cannot just continue the flight to the next waypoint or POI and do more photo stuff. No doubt it WILL come along in an upgrade so I will wait for that to happen. For now I CAN go to a single POI take control, do the photo stuff and then just tap the GO HOME button.
So as you can see regarding the title of this thread I use Phantoms as a photographers platform soon for wildlife photos or similar, not needing or wanting to do all the other aerobatics, Long distance, FPV that appeals to so many who are into this hobby.
So that's MY reasons for flying Phantoms.
I surmise that the majority of pilots on these fora probably have little or no experience of flying real airplanes so do not know just how it feels to do an ILS in fog, or a greaser landing in a field between a row of trees.
For you, I understand how good it must be to have control of an ''aeroplane'' and the hundreds of videos prove my point.
I do hope this thread will encourage more to find the time to write and add their reasons for joining this wonderful hobby.
Best to all out there
POTO.
POTO... phantoms are "marmite" :D
They are a love or hate relationship with most other enthusiasts on the site... that aside, great career profile.
Just for fun try reading: http://www.fpvhub.com/index.php/topic,21519.0.html (http://www.fpvhub.com/index.php/topic,21519.0.html)
Second your career profile mate. 😉
If it looks right, it'll fly right.
Why do we do it? Because it does what it says on the tin.
I dabbled with quads for a while but didn't have a great deal of confidence flying any of mine. Then the Phantom came way down in price and I watched a clubmate fly his. £350 later I had one and immediately found that it boosted my confidence greatly for three reasons :
1. It works straight out of the box so you can get flying immediately without having to play around with settings to get it stable in flight.
2. GPS mode - get into trouble and you simply take your hands off the sticks.
3. Lights on the arms for orientation.
Once you have built up confidence you can move to advanced settings and manual for a bit more excitement.
Like Phantomoperator I was particularly interested in aerial photography so the Phantom is a superb and stable platform, the only real limitation I found being flight time.
I am actually a keen builder so customising the Phantom for better gimbal control and making it adaptable for additional equipment (VTX, more lighting, etc.) was fun in itself, especially when it worked.
I have now moved to a Phantom 2 with brilliant flight times and a 3D gimbal. Customisation will follow the same route as the earlier Phantom.
One of my clubmates slags it off rotten at every opportunity - garbage, a toy that you simply watch flying itself and occasionally nudge in the direction you want, etc. etc. Sadly he completely fails to see the enjoyment and fulfilment it brings. His failure, not the Phantoms.
As I said at the beginning, it does what it says on the tin. Peel off the label on the tin to reveal even more that it can do.
I bought my phantom 1.1.1 because I was sick and tired of spending my hard earned cash, time, sweat, blood and tears on a quadcopter that was never truly "dialled in".
I was not a "noob" when I bought my phantom, I have been building quads for years... ranging from my first DIY wooden X quads, the middle of the road RCTimer DJI "clone" frames, to the likes of the TBS Discovery.
In my pursuits I've used budget and higher end electronics. With motors, I found mid range to give the best bang for buck and for ESCs the RCTimer SimonKs cannot be faulted.
Also, I've had the old skool KK 5.5e basic gyrostability boards (no autolevel), OpenPilot CopterControl boards, APM2.5 and 2.6 controllers, MultiWii boards, KK2.0 boards, Naze boards and NAZA controllers. Each one has their place.
My crowning glory was a NAZA Lite w/GPS controlled TBS Discovery. In total, it cost me a small fortune to build... I didn't scrimp on motors and gave it the NAZA treatment for nice easy and predictable flying characteristics. It served me very well, until I crashed it into the sea and destroyed almost everything on it.
I totted up how much it had cost me, and how much it would cost to build a new one, and it just made more sense to go out and buy one where all the hard work was already done for me. I was lucky and found a v1.1.1 for sale second hand for a pinch over £250.... which was around £100-£150 cheaper than what a new TBS Disco would have cost me to build.
My phantom is perfect for the flying I do. I Like to fly controlled and steady around a landscape, in order to capture lovely images and videos from my Mobius camera. I'm not into these miniquads, hooning around through gaps and close to the ground... just not my style, but I appreciate there are those who do... and I don't knock them because they're not like me (unlike some people on forums who can get on their high horses at times)
so that's why I fly one... not because I'm a noob and have no idea how to fly or build a "proper" quad.... which is the view many people have of Phantom owners.
When I was young I used to spend huge amounts of time and most of my cash on my Mini. I made it how I wanted it to be with a high-lift cam, 2 carbs, extractor exhaust, oil cooler, double valve springs, 5 ½ J rims, high speed wipers, 7 inch Lucas halogens lights, reversing light etc.etc. Manufacturers didn't make what I wanted, but now of course all the things I added and much more are standard, and they all work far more reliably than in my highly modified car! Just because I now buy a modern car and don't modify it doesn't mean that I don't know how it works.
The point I'm making is that just because someone buys something that works out of the box it doesn't necessarily mean that they don't know what makes it all tick. There's a lot of stick given to Phantom owners by certain RC snobs as they assume that because they haven't spent many nights toiling over a hot soldering iron building a multi-rotor from scratch, they can't possibly know what they are doing. Whilst this can be the case, it isn't always, and that's the way the market is going - a bit like cars many years ago.
P.S. – I'm not actually a Phantom owner!
Ive flown rc planes for a few years, started with a LP supercub and then got sucked in and now own quite a collection of planes from the cub..to an addiction x.
I would say Im a proficient flyer and can fly normal..or if the need arises I can whack a 5 cell in my funjet ultra and rip the sky up.....still learning though and still crash every now and again ;D
I went to try out at 3 local clubs and 2 of them it seemed the normal to fly balsa and figure of eights and anything outside of 'scale flying' seemed to be frowned upon !
The other one I went to was full of top end money modellers flying patternships and was a bit of a jaunt so I fly off a private field now.
Tried helis a few years ago and again went down the advised route of a 130x and then a 450 3d and a doddle to fly 'normal' but every time I pushed it or tried a new move it would come down and hit me for £30-£80 to replace parts and they never seem to fly the same after a good whack into the floor :P
Then decided I wanted to put a camera on a plane and did so but the footage was cr4p so thought Id try a quadcopter.
Now being new to multirotors I was under the impression that you needed a KK board or Naza etc to make them fly good.
Hell after my escapades with helis I was bricking at the prospect of building something that would fly off and injure someone or damage property so the prospect of owning something that flew 'out the box' and seemed 'idiot proof' appealed to me greatly.
Less pressure of it getting away and no qualms with building it incorrectly and a stable platform for a camera.
Also as with all my other genres of flying it seemed I was starting at the bottom, giving me something to work at and somewhere to upgrade to in the future.
I thought this forum would be a great platform to seek ideas and knowledge yet after a short while it seemed that phantom owners are frowned upon and all that is wrong with multirotors and FPV today.
Why is that though.....because I didnt spend hours building and testing one to fly that wasn't a phantom?
Because Im a 'noob' and will crash it into someones face and bring disdain and negat8ve comments to FPV'ing ?
Or because some people are so stuck up their own arses that anything anyone else does apart from them is just wrong ( see above reference to flying clubs)
I'm also a carp angler and see the bitterness and negativity in this because if you aint got the latest Korda or Fox stuff and dont have a bivvy by Trakker and your reel handles lined up you are deemed a 'noddy'
These noddies have as much chance of catching a fish with £100 of tackle as the next bloke with 5k of tackle.......except the latter has nowhere to upgrade too....the former does though and with the right education and guidance may become a credit to angling and someone who changes the way the sport is perceived.
Much like this hobby imo, and the next bloke to pick up a Phantom is an extra person that is added to the hobby that may spend x amount of money in the local hobbystore and may be an extra voice against the tough times ahead that FPV'ing seems to be facing !
Just my ten pence worth lads.. so carry on :P
You let one in, the whole bloody tribe comes :D
Some great points, some misconceptions of others opinions.
The Phantoms themselves are great devices. Lots of different people buy them, noobs, people wanting plug n play, people wanting good performance etc. The product itself does not get peoples backs up.
The problem is before it was available there was very little bad press and stupidity in the press so it was fairly low key. There was incidents don`t get me wrong. But once it was available to the masses then the masses all bought one and the news reports / incidents went through the roof. Not the odd incident but you could post up a new Phantom bad press story on a daily basis. Not because seasoned pilots were flying through the streets, crashing into buildings and being shot down with guns, it was because it was too accessible for people who had no idea what they were doing or had any idea or understanding of the repercussions on the hobby for their actions.
Previously people had to put the time in to get the understanding of how to get a multicopter to be able to get the sort of footage the Phantom can. This put lots of people off or didn`t even attract certain types. With it being plug n play suddenly anyone who wanted to take the shots could without any experience or prior knowledge.
It is a great device, I can see the appeal. Just because you bought one does not outcast you or make you a certain "type" Its the irresponsible owners who buy them for all the wrong reasons that annoys people. Its not RC snobbery. Lots of people don`t like it because of the accessibility it has given people who don`t care about what they are damaging.
Quote from: Coyote on September 07, 2014, 11:57:50 PM
Some great points, some misconceptions of others opinions.
The Phantoms themselves are great devices. Lots of different people buy them, noobs, people wanting plug n play, people wanting good performance etc. The product itself does not get peoples backs up.
The problem is before it was available there was very little bad press and stupidity in the press so it was fairly low key. There was incidents don`t get me wrong. But once it was available to the masses then the masses all bought one and the news reports / incidents went through the roof. Not the odd incident but you could post up a new Phantom bad press story on a daily basis. Not because seasoned pilots were flying through the streets, crashing into buildings and being shot down with guns, it was because it was too accessible for people who had no idea what they were doing or had any idea or understanding of the repercussions on the hobby for their actions.
Previously people had to put the time in to get the understanding of how to get a multicopter to be able to get the sort of footage the Phantom can. This put lots of people off or didn`t even attract certain types. With it being plug n play suddenly anyone who wanted to take the shots could without any experience or prior knowledge.
It is a great device, I can see the appeal. Just because you bought one does not outcast you or make you a certain "type" Its the irresponsible owners who buy them for all the wrong reasons that annoys people. Its not RC snobbery. Lots of people is like it because of the accessibility it has given people who don`t care about what they are damaging.
But you could say the same about rc planes and helis as you can buy them anywhere nowadays whereas before you had to build one.
There are idiots in any hobby and whilst the general ease of accesability of multi rotors now is going to increase 'incidents' it brings new people and new money into the industry coupled with new products and lower prices ?
I believe a lot of the negativity is down to the phrasing 'drone' and the general publics misconception of that word.
Drone is thought of as something that is used by the military as a weapon and the term itself is used by the press to describe something that kills people or spys on them.
The reality is though that its an unmanned rc vehicle (or quadcopter to us)that has been tagged with a stupid name by the press that will make headlines.
QuoteBut you could say the same about rc planes and helis as you can buy them anywhere nowadays whereas before you had to build one.
Its all getting more accessible. You can buy ready made plane, or heli, but you couldn`t give one to someone who has never flown before and they fly it. It would be an instant write off. The Phantom can be flown by people with no prior experience at all because it basically flies itself.
QuoteI believe a lot of the negativity is down to the phrasing 'drone' and the general publics misconception of that word.
Drone is thought of as something that is used by the military as a weapon and the term itself is used by the press to describe something that kills people or spys on them.
The reality is though that its an unmanned rc vehicle (or quadcopter to us)that has been tagged with a stupid name by the press that will make headlines.
Agreed, I hate the term "Drone" when it is completely inaccurate but the press latched onto the term, it became the word to use and then mainstream.
Quote from: Steve W on September 07, 2014, 11:33:24 PM
You let one in, the whole bloody tribe comes :D
ha ha :)
Quote from: Coyote on September 08, 2014, 12:52:02 AM
QuoteBut you could say the same about rc planes and helis as you can buy them anywhere nowadays whereas before you had to build one.
Its all getting more accessible. You can buy ready made plane, or heli, but you couldn`t give one to someone who has never flown before and they fly it. It would be an instant write off. The Phantom can be flown by people with no prior experience at all because it basically flies itself.
QuoteI believe a lot of the negativity is down to the phrasing 'drone' and the general publics misconception of that word.
Drone is thought of as something that is used by the military as a weapon and the term itself is used by the press to describe something that kills people or spys on them.
The reality is though that its an unmanned rc vehicle (or quadcopter to us)that has been tagged with a stupid name by the press that will make headlines.
Agreed, I hate the term "Drone" when it is completely inaccurate but the press latched onto the term, it became the word to use and then mainstream.
I disagree with your comment about planes mate because they are so cheap you can buy one and try it with no worries about the financial loss. Theres plenty of vids on youtube of people of people doing this and its no different to quads imo.
My first foray into rc planes was a £70 4 channel plane that I smashed into a building as I had'nt got a clue what i was doing....I kept going though and sought education through forums and can now fly well with that advice.
I suppose the difference with quads is that people see the awesome footage you can get and then try it themselves and its the fault of people that know what they are doing flying in areas they really shouldnt, take the beach vids etc and the bloke flying round blackpool tower etc as an example, these people who are 'veterans' are the people responsible for making it appear cool and fun and if you couple this with the complete lack of advice given by rtf sellers now and its a recipe for disaster !
Also the fact that model clubs seem to frown on multis and the negative vibe given to noobs on forums gives people little chance for education bar just going for it.
Forums like this should embrace and educate new users and not vilify them so they go it alone as that is when accidents will happen.
Everyone needs to start somewhere and until manufacturers advise and people are welcomed into the community then the problem wont go away any time soon.
I love my Phantom.. I was a hater once and considered them 'a toy' until I saw one being flown and got to handle it nearly two years back, after that I HAD TO HAVE ONE..
If you want a great AP craft and can afford to pay the premium for having a well-build, high quality RTF platform then why the hell not??
Quote from: jukebox on September 08, 2014, 10:58:16 AM
Forums like this should embrace and educate new users and not vilify them so they go it alone as that is when accidents will happen.
Everyone needs to start somewhere and until manufacturers advise and people are welcomed into the community then the problem wont go away any time soon.
I think this Forum is pretty good at welcoming and educating both new and more experienced users with advice on equipment and regulation. Yes, there have been heated exchanges and always will be when you get diverse personalities together in the one place but I see very little evidence of vilification and a lot of evidence of wanting people to progress and fly responsibly. Well done guys. :)
I don't think anyones against something that's easy to setup and get flying with... the only issue are irresponsible owners. Just a few years ago, people wouldn't have had the chance to act without thinking with them, because they'd be in a pile of bits after 5 minutes.
There are several schools to this hobby - and obviously we don't all think the same. I like building things, and I think there's great value in doing this - even if things go wrong, and you rebuild. However, crashing and rebuilding over and over again, can put some people off, and they could leave the hobby - so a platform like this that's much easier to get in the air is a good fit.
Why do we do it?............. 'we don't'
Quote from: Goosgog on September 08, 2014, 05:29:08 PM
Why do we do it?............. 'we don't'
Fantastic, thoughtful and insightful post that brings a whole new dimension to the train of thought.....cheers mate :-*
:laugh: